News: 26 December 2021

Recently I haven't been posting as many blog posts. Part of that is because I've gotten more involved in my other writing projects.

The Bible project was going slowly for a while. I had to figure out how I was going to approach it. Over the past week I finally was able to go at the pace it will take to finish in what I consider a reasonable amount of time. The earlier chapters sometimes settle questions or prove points so that later chapters don't have to comment on them, which is an encouraging phenomenon (with respect to finishing on time). But as I go I find new writing styles and areas of discussion. So Exodus (where I am now) presents new challenges.

The MSLN project is doing okay. I'm currently writing up notes. I think I have enough to try to draft the Metaphysical Organism and Speaker parts (at least, a first draft), but I think I need to do more thinking about the Legitimacy part.

Sin is False Morality

Sin is often a moral act, it's just that the morality is a bad one. For instance, lust as a necessary thing for people to engage in in order to pursue mating partners so that their genes get passed on. It's extremely important that genes get passed on, so much so that men have to stare at every attractive woman who walks by, just in case it's an opportunity to pass on the gift of life.

Anger is necessary so that we can defend what is ours. It's extremely important that we not die -- we are the precious gift of life that is our responsibility to not lose -- so much so that if someone even gets close to being close to threatening a resource that might somewhat prevent our deaths, we must become angry -- just in case that's the critical thing that is the cause of us living an extra day or week or even month.

(Any other sin that can be linked to self-interest works similarly.)

When we make idols out of people or things, then we are being moral -- the morality of worshiping false gods.

Satan tempts us to be falsely moral, using responsibility.

There are theistic worldviews and atheistic worldviews. According to atheistic worldviews, there is no God to help you, no God to trust in. You have to take care of yourself. If you do wrong, you have to take responsibility for what you did, because there is no God to make everything right in the end. So your mistakes will never be covered over, and you need to always get things right the first time. Being very responsible in an atheistic way takes us away from trusting in God, because we must be in control of our own (or others') well-being, not letting God be in control. But in order to be responsible to God (to "fear" him, perhaps), we need to trust him. His reality calls for us to trust, so we need to respond in trust. Trusting God can be a deliberate, ethical act.

Being responsible to the wrong morality is potentially worse than to be irresponsible, although that also can be bad.

A Reason Why Fiducialism May Be Necessary

In Fiducialism, I discuss the attitude of fiducialism, of seeking to trust. It can also mean an ethical orientation of trust-maximization.

Is it necessary to maximize trust? Here's a reason why:

We trust with something like a body. I would use the metaphor of "body" for the part of us that trusts, although it's not identical to the physical body. This body is opened up, or not. If we refuse to open all the parts of us, we can't fully trust God.

Trusting is valuing with your body. Your body says "this thing will enhance me" and that which enhances you is valuable to you (in this case to the part of you that trusts, your "trust body"). So if we can't fully trust God, we can't love him with all of our beings. Therefore we should seek to open up the different parts of our trust body, so that we can receive anything at all in those parts. We might prefer to not trust, but if we learn to trust now, we will be prepared for when we meet God.

Disestablishedness vs. Anti-temptation

Epistemic status: provisional. May be incompatible with something I've said about disestablishedness or establishedness.

In MSLN Reasons to Oppose X-Risks, I said that it might be the case that rebuilding civilization after a near-extinction of humanity, or an extinction (God restarting humanity), could be painful for God, involve many generations with less-than-ideal moral environments (in need of progressing morally to the level we've reached now), and, if our civilization is bad spiritually in terms of potentially leading to hardening (which it sometimes seems to be), ours might still be better than average -- if God wants to end our civilization, he should make that call (to "roll the dice" and see what the next civilization would bring). He could end our civilization unilaterally whenever he wanted, and since he hasn't, we might assume that it's our job to keep things going, to not let civilization end.

However, in Establishedness and Loving God (in the section on abortion), I said that civilizational disestablishedness can be uniquely good for developing people spiritually. This is why this life is better than heaven or the Millennium so that, from one point of view, it's not worth aborting babies so that they are not messed up spiritually by living in this life (instead of a nicer afterlife), or from another point of view, it makes sense that God has us live through this "vale of tears" rather than sending us straight to heaven -- being in a nice environment like heaven may not be conducive to us getting the really essential good, for us to become people in tune with God, who love him with all our beings.

It occurred to me that if the disestablishedness of this life is good, or has good effects, maybe a case could be made that if God had to restart civilization after human extinction, things could be better spiritually in the new, less-developed civilization than they are in our civilization as it is now. So then it wouldn't be as clear that we should continue our current civilization (or the human species) -- maybe we should let it (or them) end.

The way I try to resolve this is to say that there are two dynamics in civilization: (dis)establishedness and (anti-)temptation. Establishedness says "you are as you should be, you are the way you are". Anti-temptation causes you to see God as desirable, seekable, trustworthy, or whatever else helps you to bond with him. If you are established in such a way that you do not seek the deepest connection with God, then for your own good, it's good for there to be disestablishedness in your life, to break your bad establishedness. But, in a world without anti-temptations, disestablishedness may not do any good. It's possible to break a bad establishedness without a good one re-forming in its place.

So over time, civilization works to reduce disestablishedness but it is the job of those who love God to anti-tempt, to make up for the loss of disestablishedness. Arguably our civilization has built up a lot of establishedness and anti-temptation. Compared to the Millennium, it is less established and has less anti-temptation. The ideal world, for spiritual development, is one that permits some establishedness but also has a lot of disestablishedness, as well as a lot of anti-temptation and not too much temptation. We have significant amounts of disestablishedness and anti-temptation nowadays, which likely makes our time more ideal for spiritual development than under the Millennium (on average, given that the disestablishedness and anti-temptation are currently unevenly distributed among the human population). Also because we do have anti-temptation to lose, it isn't clear that the spiritual regime that would result from restarting civilization would necessarily be as favorable for spiritual development, because it might not have as high a level of anti-temptation.

(Could Jesus (an example of an anti-temptation) be preached in a new (restarted) civilization after an extinction of humans? Certainly, but for some reason he didn't come (so couldn't have been preached) until 2,000 years ago. Maybe that reason would apply to telling about him in a new civilization, starting off from a low level of development.)

So it still looks like it is the case that disestablishedness can have good effects, and also the case that civilization is worth preserving.